Brand New VPN Apps for IPVanish VPN

This is our biggest release of VPN apps ever!

We are so incredibly excited to announce that all of our applications — VPN apps for iOS, Android, Macintosh and Windows — have undergone a major transformation! Over the last few months, the team here at IPVanish has secretly been working on an entirely new edition of the IPVanish VPN app. In order to achieve this endeavor, months of planning, beta and internal QA testing went into account. At one point, everything from the skin color of the application, the design of the user interface, the server search navigation, and the menu settings was something completely different. But finally, here and now, at the end of September 2016, we’re ready to reveal the fruit of our labors. Update to the latest version of IPVanish VPN.

Design

At first glance, you’ll immediately notice that the theme for our VPN apps has gone darker. The clunky, dated icons for server selection have been retired, as has the stark white account panel. The user interface has evolved into a sleeker, more compact version of itself, comparable with the trends of today.

Intuitive design allows us to keep the powerful settings easily accessible, yet out of obvious sight. Built with simplicity in mind, the new versions of our IPVanish VPN apps were developed to be approachable and easy-to-use. One shining example of that effort is the prominent placement of a VPN On/Off button; the button is accessible on every screen within every edition of IPVanish v3 VPN apps. With this change, we’ve made it extraordinarily easy to initiate a VPN connection without any technical prowess nor heavy consideration. And with our load balancing algorithm — one of our proprietary features — our app will always initiate connections to the best VPN server available.

Most significantly, we’ve established a better cohesion between the varying editions of our VPN apps. From desktop to mobile and across all operating systems, there is a continuity in design and settings so that users will be familiar with the application no matter what device they are using.

Features

When the development team began their initial planning for this version of IPVanish VPN, their ultimate goal was to achieve feature consistency between every platform that the app is available for. With previous versions of IPVanish VPN apps, there was an inconsistency between popular features across devices. For example, the VPN kill switch — first introduced to OS X in an April 2015 release — did not make its way to the Windows counterpart until earlier this year. But now, that same kill switch is available across every platform on which IPVanish VPN apps are available.

IPVanish VPN v3 (v3.0) features include the following:

Load Balancing

This background feature improves the algorithm that selects the best VPN server for a user’s connection based on ping time and server load. Therefore, users will now be presented with not the closest, but the fastest server for the best automated connections.

QuickConnect

Working with the aforementioned load balancing algorithm, QuickConnect is a rapid-fire hub for VPN server selection. As soon as a user chooses either a region or a city, the application will determine which server (based on their selection) is the most optimal for establishing a VPN connection.

Optimized Server Searching

There are multiple ways to search through the list of over 500 VPN servers. Users will be able to “QuickConnect” to a region, choose from an interactive map, or filter and search the servers from a list. The filters in particular can vet servers by region, latency, and by name.

Advanced DNS Control

DNS controls have become more substantial within each platform. While DNS leak protection has been hardened, support for third-party DNS has been implemented across the board. This, combined with a DNS reset button, will enable users to flush erroneous DNS codes from their network settings with ease.

Kill Switch

The kill switch feature will automatically stop (or kill) all network activity if a VPN connection is interrupted. Just as easily, a network connection can be reactivated from within the IPVanish VPN apps.

OpenVPN Scramble

OpenVPN Scramble is an additional layer of security for use in nations where the OpenVPN connection protocol can be detected and the the traffic terminated. When enabled, this feature can counter this firewall blockade, also known as deep packet inspection.

On Demand VPN

The three ‘On Demand’ settings within the IPVanish VPN apps give more customization to user privacy settings than ever before. Leading the settings is the ‘Always On’ option, which will auto-connect to the VPN any time Internet traffic is detected. Following are two customization options for Network SSIDs and web domains. For these respective On Demand settings, users can enter a list of previously saved websites or Wi-Fi networks that, upon connection, will automatically initiate the VPN.

LAN Blocking

A brand-new feature to IPVanish (and one our competitors are very much lacking) is LAN Blocking. When this is enabled, no device on the local area network (LAN) can communicate with a user’s device. In addition to this, LAN blocking also prevents any user’s outbound traffic from going over the LAN.

Automatic IP Switching

We found this feature to be highly popular in our Windows client, so we rolled it out for IPVanish VPN v3.0. This user-enabled option allows your IP address to automatically change based on a pre-selected time interval of either 45, 60, 90, or 120 minutes. When an IP switches, the VPN connection will be temporarily interrupted while changing IP addresses.

IPv6 Leak Protection

As the Internet transitions from using IPv4 addresses to IPv6, the inconsistency of IP versions from downloading advertisements, images, and files can leak a user’s true IP to a third-party. When this feature is enabled, however, all Internet traffic is forced over IPv4 as opposed to a combination of both IPv4 and IPv6.

In addition to the major updates described above, we’ve added a slew of finite tweaks and upgrades for better-performing VPN apps. Improved crash reporting sends error information to us faster so that we can squash whichever bugs appear.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on how we can continue to improve our Windows VPN software in order to best fit your needs. Coupled with a more inclusive account access integration, the slick design is a major upgrade from the previous versions of our IPVanish VPN apps, and ultimately provides for a richer experience.

We hope you are as excited about these new features as we are, and we look forward to hearing your feedback on how we can improve our VPN service and application to best fit your needs.